Working Title: Olympus
by Niggle
Summary: Clark wakes from centuries of enslavement to find his world changed beyond recognition. FutureficWIP. Critical comments welcome. Fourth chapter added.
1. Awakening

**Author's Note 5/25/05:** I've tacked the first chapter onto the end of the prologue here so that the numbers assigned to the chapters match up. If you've already read the prologue, just scroll down to get to the next bit (which is very short, I'm afraid). Many thanks to everyone who commented on the prologue. I wish it hadn't taken me so long to get the next part out, but...well, I guess you can see why I try to make sure I've finished a story before I post it. I'm terribly lazy and a very slow worker. I have a WIP blog set up if you're interested in spoilers for "Olympus" or a record of my frustrations with it. It's linked at the fanfic archive I recently set up for my silly stories. The link is available from my profile page. Enough babbling. Here's more story. I hope it's okay.

* * *

**Author's Note:** This story takes crazy poetic license with Superman's powers. Instead of telling a story about Superman's limitations, I've decided to tell a story about what it would be like if he had no limitations. I usually don't post stories unless they are finished, but this one is special. So I've posted a preview. Please tell me what you think. 

**Summary:** Clark wakes from centuries of enslavement to find everything he loved obliterated.

**Prologue**

The monitoring deck was silent, but it was a silence that gradually whelmed the ears, becoming a sound in itself, a sound from nowhere. She had come to believe that the mind created a kind of psychic white noise from the emptiness. Because it was too incredible that the most important and most sophisticated feat of engineering in human history should work its wonders without so much as a whisper. Mountains should make noise when they are moved. Even in the soundless cold of space.

On the floor below, where the energy from the extraction chamber was converted into usable forms, the technicians wore ear protection and the floor reverberated with the movement of the turbines. But on the upper level, vibration was kept to a minimum. The superconductors were fragile instruments, despite the horrendous energies they channeled. They formed a deadly, glittering web around the power core, radiating out from the center of the chamber to the conversion columns in the mirrored walls.

When she worked third shift, she would spend hours staring at that maze through the vid-linked observation window, imagining what it would be like to stand beside the power core itself and see with her own eyes the technology that made everything possible. In low-clearance documents, it was referred to as the "Helson" machine, after the twenty-second-century engineer who supposedly designed it. In classified docs, it was the "recovered alien technology". There were about a dozen people on the planet (or in orbit) who knew that the power core was actually organic. The high-level technicians who worked on the monitoring deck with her called it "he" because of its resemblance to a human male. To them, it was the latest in a long line of anthropomorphized molecular machines that had started in the twenty-first century with an organic AI named Dana.

And there was one person who knew that the body now being sucked dry by the Orbital Power Station had once belonged to a sentient creature who had walked among men as one of them, who had been adopted by the Terrans when his own world was destroyed, who had lived and laughed and grieved with Earth's people, who had led her heroes in battle, who had bled for her, and who had ultimately been betrayed by her.

When they had needed him most they had turned on him, enslaved him for their purposes. Over time the crime had been forgotten even by those in charge of perpetuating it. They had grown complacent with the belief that they held nothing more than a glorified solar cell, incapable of independent action. It hadn't occurred to them to wonder what would happen if he were given his freedom – or that such a thing was even possible. No one had even thought about it. No one but her. And even she couldn't imagine what the wrath of a god looked like.

She slipped a data disc into the main console and executed the virus that would bring the entire system crashing down. Then she stepped back to watch as the titan's chains were shattered.

**

Chapter 1: Awakening

**

When he opened his eyes, it was like being born. He was conscious of the past as a deep, insensate darkness. He had been nowhere, in a place that wasn't a place at all, that had no dimension or time. Now there was space around him, light in the darkness, and pain - pain everywhere.

His mouth was open, but he couldn't breathe because there was no air. Several moments of violent, soundless struggle passed before he grew accustomed to the fact that he couldn't asphyxiate. But the instinct to breathe was overwhelming and he felt as though he were somehow frozen in the moment of his death. The crushing emptiness of the space around him was somehow worse than the nowhere that had been before. And it was cold - so cold. There was ice under his skin, burning in his flesh.

When his new sight showed him the silvery threads snaking under his skin, his reaction was instinctive, violent.

He had no thought but escape, no emotion but desperation. Fatigue was nothing. The deep cold, nothing. There was only the animal instinct clawing at the inside of his skull. He acted without knowing what he did. The delicate metal melted and scattered, refreezing immediately into irregular, shiny globs. The mirrors shattered silently at his touch. He reeled away from the light, the movement, the cage. He could hear nothing, but he saw the large structure below him shudder with a crushing impact. The terrible bone-deep pain lessened and then disappeared altogether. He felt a great fire sweeping through the empty places it had left. He felt the cold but he was no longer cold. Though there was still no air to breathe he no longer felt like he was suffocating. The warmth spread through him, banishing some of his fear. It beat in irregular waves against him, a soothing current washing over his aching body.

He moved into that feeling of warm safety, riding the solar wind to its source. He couldn't tell that he was moving except that the frosted blue sphere before him grew larger, a tiny island of color in a shoreless sea of night. He recoiled from it violently, driven by a nameless compulsion through the darkness, to where the waves of sweet heat had their origin. He saw the radiance ahead blazing in a variety of spectra and drove himself toward it, the terrifying emptiness of the space around him urging him faster and faster. Again there was no sense of movement, but the small circle of light gradually grew until it filled his horizon, casting out miles-long whipping tendrils of flameless fire.

He raced forward until there was nothing in his vision but a blinding expanse of exploding energy. It filled him, burning insatiably, cocooning him in sheltering plasma at the same time it assaulted him with planet-shredding pressure. Here that tiny blue sphere would be consumed utterly, swallowed by the immensity of the nuclear forge. He pushed on through wave after wave of charged gas exploding outward with the force of fusing nuclei. At first the molten energies seemed to stretch forever, but finally he reached the core, where the sheer kinetic, atom-splitting force of it would have taken his breath away if his lungs weren't already full of 27 million-degree helium and hydrogen.

He balanced in the center of the violence, absorbing energy and redirecting it continuously, screaming soundlessly with the beautiful agony of it. He was dying over and over, he was being born over and over, it was torture, it was ecstasy, he couldn't stand it, he didn't want it to end, it was excruciatingly chaotic, it was the comforting, inevitable result of cause and effect. Everything that ever was, that would be, in a single obliterating eruption of power.

_"The Sun's output is 3.8 x 1033 ergs/second, or about 5 x 1023 horsepower. How much is that? It is enough energy to melt a bridge of ice 2 miles wide, 1 mile thick, and extending the entire way from the Earth to the Sun, _in one second_."   
-NASA's Cosmicopia_


	2. Errata

**Errata**

**Atlas 5.3**  
**Bytehard Systems, Inc.**

**SAFEBOOT**

**ESSENTIAL SYSTEM FUNCTIONS ONLY**

**sysscan**

**Initializing diagnostic scan...  
Checking primary disks...okay  
Checking secondary disks...okay  
Primary power grid...NOT RESPONDING  
Auxilary power...75  
Conversion grid...NOT RESPONDING  
Storage grid...NOT RESPONDING  
Transport grid...okay  
Life support...okay  
Power core...NOT RESPONDING**

**ERROR 526: CRITICAL POWER FAILURE**

**EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN**

The technicians stood in a tense semicricle around the main console. Their haggard, often bloody faces were washed in the monitor's dim, pale glow. No one spoke as the station's central computer once again shut itself off halfway through its skeleton startup. The battery-powered emergency lights threw the small, dead forest of computer banks into red-lit peaks and shadowed valleys. The observation screens were dark. It was a long time before anyone spoke.

"We've...lost power. How did we lose power?" a high-level administator ventured at last. Computer specialists exchanged nervous glances.

"Maybe," one of them offered. "Maybe if the shielding for the conversion floor was weak and the radiation overloaded the turbines..."

Other voices chimed in, thinking out loud to keep thoughts from turning ugly. Theories were proposed, examined and discarded, slowly at first, then more quickly as the shock of what had happened began to wear off.

"It could have been that GRB we tracked earlier, it coulda fried some of the superconductors..."

"Doesn't explain why the system keeps crashing on aux. Even if there was a power surge, the system should be intact..."

"There must be a hardware problem. We'll have to check everything manually. That's the only way to..."

"No, it's gotta be software. There's something wrong with the system itself..."

"There's something weird going on here. How did transport and life support stay up when everything else went down? Aren't they on the same hard grid?"

The door to the observation deck burst open then, to admit the young tech-in-training who had been sent to physically check the sections of the station that had not been closed off by automatic systems designed to contain fires and prevent atmospheric loss. He stood there for a moment, breathless.

"Well," the adminstrator asked. "How are we doing structurally?"

"One of the personal transport units is gone," the young man replied. "Somebody...somebody jumped ship."

Silence. Heads turned, counting, assessing.

"Where's...Gaia?"

Outside the heavily shielded walls, the station continued to fall around the planet, debris from its shattered, glittering core spiraling out into the brutal emptiness behind it.

* * *

**THE DAILY PLANET**  
**OCTOBER 18, 2446**  
**ORBITAL POWER SAYS STATION SECURE**  
**By Sully Archer**  
**METROPOLIS ---**

Representatives from Orbital Power issued a press release today denying reports of a disturbance at the Atlas Orbital Power Station, in geosynchronous orbit since 2198. "This station has survived solar flares, mechanical failures, even a meteor strike," one official said. "No unusual activity was reported yesterday. Atlas has been in the sky a long time. There's not much could even dent it. Our power supply is perfectly safe."

No astronomical events were observed yesterday, but sources within the energy giant tell the _Planet_ that several high-level executives were called to emergency meetings late last night. So far the subject of those meetings has not been disclosed. In fact, OP's public relations officer denies they even took place.

Meanwhile, yesterday's series of brownouts has consumers worried that another energy crisis is on the way...

**THE DAILY PLANET**  
**OCTOBER 19, 2446**  
**PLANET REPORTER FABRICATES FACTS**  
**By Staff**  
**METROPOLIS ---**

An internal review of a story reported by the _Planet's_ own Sully Archer has concluded that Archer failed to follow basic journalistic principles in the preparation and reporting of yesterday's article, "Orbital Power Says Station Secure." Several statements from the article could not be authenticated, including claims that senior executives from Orbital Power were called to emergency meetings on the seventeenth...

Archer's current whereabouts are unknown, but the senior editorial staff of the _Planet_ assures its readers that he is no longer working for the paper...


	3. Metropolis

**Metropolis**

She found him on a street corner, a pillar of desolated stillness in a river of pedestrians and traffic. The city had a current that parted around him and reformed on the other side, as if simultaneously indifferent and wary of his presence. The current inside of him was frozen. It belonged to a different time, before the river around him had worn away at the surrounding banks. He looked at the city and it looked back without recognition.

Gaia marveled at the way people walked right past him without even noticing the power inside. Would she have done the same, not knowing what she knew? Even knowing what he was and where she might find him, it would have been easy not to recognize him. The body at the power station had been diminished by long decades of confinement. The man standing before her was...beautiful. She had never seen anyone so perfect. And it was authentic perfection, not the surgical kind. He was a work of art. And he looked barely twenty, despite the centuries weighing on his broad shoulders.

"I thought I might find you here," she commented as she approached him. He did not respond, but stood as still as ever, his head tilted to look at something far above him. Gaia followed the line of his sight to the Daily Planet globe, spinning in neon splendor on top of the ancient skyscraper across the street. "It's the oldest building in Metropolis," she continued in the face of his silence. "Probably looks familiar, huh?"

As she watched him watching the globe, she realized that there was more pain than recognition in his features. The place must have changed too much to comfort him now. The echoes of the past embedded in its architecture only made the strangeness of it more cutting. Maybe it would have been better if they'd torn the thing down.

"I guess this place was special," Gaia ventured. "Isn't this where your reporter friends worked?"

She was getting used to his impenetrable silence and wasn't surprised when he failed to react to her voice. The nearly constant wind of Metropolis lashed his dark hair - much longer than in the pictures – across his face, but he ignored that too. She wondered what he was seeing that she could not.

"Come on," she said, grabbing one of his muscular arms and tugging gently. "Let me buy you a cup of coffee."

Gaia didn't see his head move. One instant his head was turned upward and in the next his pale green eyes were boring into hers, nearly stopping her heart with the force of their agony and expectation. The name came in a soft, breathy whisper. Gaia didn't recognize it; it wasn't in any of the files.

"Chloe…"

She hesitated, smoothing the stray blond strands the wind had sent whipping across her eyes with one hand. Her other was still wrapped around his unresisting wrist. She didn't know how to answer the longing in his eyes, and after a moment it flickered and died into emptiness. She turned away, unable to bear what she had seen inside of him.

"Come on," she repeated mechanically, and pulled him through the rushing tide of bodies to the coffee spot across from the Planet. It felt very strange, guiding this creature through the crowd like a child. She was extremely aware of the fact that she did so under his sufferance. He could have pulled free with frighteningly little effort. This perfectly human submission was somehow even scarier.

The Met Cup was, like every spot in the city, never truly slow, but the constant rush had eased enough to free a table or two. Gaia led the young man to an empty barstool and put in an order with the electronic waiter in the center of the tiny table. He succumbed to her guidance in a kind of indifferent daze. She sighed and studied him as he sat there looking vaguely around the room. Not quite what she had expected.

She'd spent years worming her way into the elite government organizations that controlled access to historical records that some believed existed only in rumor. She had exhausted every resource at her disposal to collect every piece of hard data relating to a man who had receded to the realm of legend. The stories people still told about him were impressive, but the truth was more impressive still.

The virus she designed to take out the power station was the culmination of all her efforts to revive that legend, to resurrect an immense power from the past. It had been more than a project for her; it had been a quest. She had chased a hero down the corridors of time in order to save a world she felt crumbling around her. The image she had constructed of him had guided her along the darkest paths she'd traveled to reach her goal.

And now the reality was clashing with that image.

He looked out of place, to say the least. The crowds passing on all sides displayed an impressive array of fashions and styles, some of them synthetic and some of them expensively organic. The rural denim trousers and simple, short-sleeved, white shirt he had somehow acquired did not fit any of them. And he wore the plain garb with such unhurried steadiness that he stood out in the din like a deep, still pool in the middle of a rapid.

His features were too smooth and youthful for the years they had seen. He was gorgeous and graceful, but he looked like a farm whelp. The man she had tracked down had been a leader. He had radiated confidence and courage. He'd been an inspiration to billions of people. When he talked, people listened. This...boy didn't talk. He only examined the world around him as if seeing it for the first time. He looked more like someone in need of protection than someone who could provide it.

Gaia's thoughtful silence turned sullen. She had reached the end of her road only to find the treasure she sought broken beyond repair.

A server dropped off their drinks. Gaia had ordered a pair of syncho lattes. "They're made with real milk," she informed her distant companion. "I thought they might remind you of home."

He picked up the cheap metal cup without wrapping it in an insulator and looked at it as if it were an object of great significance. The emptiness in his eyes filled once again with a sorrow too deep for words. "She used to say she had a five-latte minimum for each issue," he whispered suddenly. "She always sent me on coffee runs because I was faster than Pete. She thought it was because I didn't stop to talk to people but it was really because I ran instead of driving."

Gaia froze for a second with her cup halfway to her mouth before setting it back down, untasted. She watched him staring at the coffee and seeing a past that had not been in any of the files she'd uncovered. What part of his life had that come from? Those were not the words of the most powerful man on the planet. "Who-" she began, but his arresting green eyes settled on her again, burning the words from her tongue. She didn't know how to answer those eyes.

And just like that he was gone. A strong breeze swept her hair back from her face. The cup he had been examining wobbled in a short half-circle and clanked onto its side, dripping real milk and synthetic coffee onto the floor.


	4. Out of the West

**Chapter 4: Out of the West**

The meeting that changed Decca's life occurred where chance encounters rarely did. She found him walking out of the west on a lonely road worn by horse's hooves. No shoes, no luggage. Just a dark-haired boy in blue denim and white cotton. How did someone travel so far into nowhere without shoes? She did not make a habit of investigating mysteries because mysteries usually meant trouble, but she reined Hermes in to take a closer look at this puzzle as he passed.

He didn't look at her, didn't even appear to notice her presence. He walked slowly, eyes on the ground, strands of longish hair falling over his face. She did not make a habit of talking to strangers because strangers usually meant trouble, but on that hazy October afternoon she found herself turning from the setting sun and calling out to a lost boy.

"Hey. Kid."

She had just about concluded that the horse was fine but there was no one in the saddle when he paused and turned around to look at her. She reined Hermes in again and, for a moment, she simply looked back. It was easy to just look. Easy to settle slowly into the depths of those large eyes. There was something unfathomable beneath their surface and before her practical nature asserted itself, she felt a compulsion to keep staring until she explored those deeps.

Something strange about him. And strange usually meant - what else? - trouble. She felt she ought to have turned away. Instead, she spoke to him again.

"Where you headed?"

He appeared to consider her question, his pale eyes fired like emeralds in the dying light as he looked at her. She could almost see him grope for an answer and try to find words for the emptiness he found instead.

"You looking for work?" she asked gruffly.

He considered this too, in his vague way, but appeared no closer to a reply. Decca fidgeted uncomfortably in her saddle, wondering why she had said that. She'd had very few positive experiences with hired hands. In fact, there were several negative ones buried on the east edge of her property. Having a stranger under your roof meant sleeping even closer to your gun and Decca had decided that, on balance, the extra sleep was worth the extra work. She sighed. Apparently she made exceptions for bootless boys of quesitonable sanity.

"Look, my place is back that way, five kims," she said, pointing in the direction he had been walking. "I've got some business to take care of at the Millers', but you can wait for me at the gate. I can't pay you nothing right now, but you'll have a roof, a meal and plenty to do."

Her offer did not elicit any more of a response than her questions had. He took it in but could give nothing back. Decca bore his silent gaze for a few moments more, then kicked Hermes into a westward trot.

* * *

The boy stayed in Decca's thoughts while she bartered some syncho off Jack Miller and started back. It was quite dark by the time she reached her own property. The ancient wooden gate leapt out of the darkness as she trotted up with a battery-powered halogen in one hand and Hermes' reins in the other.

He was waiting for her at the gate.

She pulled up short, startled. Hermes snorted indignantly and side-stepped. Decca stared.

Her dat pack had gathered at the fenceline, as they were supposed to. But they were not baying at the intruder. They had gathered along the property line and were standing stock-still. The alpha, an enormous bitch named Naia, was looking straight into the crouching boy's eyes, her leonine head ducked slightly, wary.

Decca watched the strange scene for a moment, then dismounted and barked a release command. The pack stirred from their strange pose and milled around her as she led Hermes through the gate. The dark-haired boy followed and for the first time she realized how incredibly tall he was. Decca didn't consider herself short, but he was at least a head taller than she was. And shoulders to match. Jesus. He'd be hell at baling.

"You got a name, son?"

He gave her another aching, soulful look. Foal's eyes. Foal's eyes on a stallion's body.

"Kal-El."


End file.
